When I walked past the Bonaventure bookstore yesterday, I saw something unusual.

Along with the students, faculty and usual customers were some families from the area looking to buy their young children a Bona shirt or other souvenir from the basketball team’s historic season.

Sports are about winning and losing; that’s why we keep score. But they also about much more. That’s why the expressions I saw on those kids’ faces in the bookstore will stay with me much longer than the score of last night’s game

The best way to gauge the state of the nation may not come in the formal address President Donald Trump delivers to Congress on Jan. 30.

A better measure may arrive two days earlier at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards.

Awards shows tend to be liberal, anti-establishment affairs, and this year’s Grammys are likely to offer more of the same. But it just won’t be the ceremony that tells us the state of the union. Instead it is the nominees for Best Record of the Year that will paint a picture nation’s mood. These are the songs that are selling hundreds of thousands of copies. That means their messages resonate with Americans. Why else would the mass populace have purchased these recordings in such great volume? Continue reading →

With each new year, the annual ritual of making resolutions brings promises, goals and hope for a brighter future.

In 2018, the key to that brighter future may lie in spending less time debating divisive political issues, reading troubling stories about sexual improprieties in the workplace and worrying about national economic trends that are beyond our control. more

Come Nov. 9, the baseball season will be over, but Anne and I still will be talking about the National Pastime.

We will be joined by four of our journalism students for a conference presentation titled “Baseball, Blogging and Beat Reporting: Using a Spring Training Blog to Teach Journalism Students How to Cover a Beat.”

As the title of our presentation suggests, we will be discussing how we incorporate a baseball blog into the courses we teach in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University. We use the blog because St. Bonaventure is located in a rural area of Western New York, where opportunities to cover local governments, school boards and other traditional news beats are limited. Continue reading →

For many people, Columbus Day is a time for parades and a celebration of Italian heritage. Others contend that it is wrong to honor Christopher Columbus as a hero.

For me, Columbus Day is significant for another reason. It was on Columbus Day in 1975 that I spent my first day in a newsroom as a working journalist as a reporter for a suburban weekly named The Montclair Times. more